End of an Error: An Epitaph to a Failed Presidency

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“Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”—the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Aug. 28, 1963

“Our long national nightmare is over.”—President Gerald Ford, Aug. 9, 1974

I’m not sure which of those two historical quotes better captures the moment Monday as America marks the end of an era—I mean, error—as President Joe Biden departs the White House and retires to his oceanfront mansion in Delaware and his vice president, Kamala Harris, presumably returns to California to plot her next move.

But since President Donald Trump’s Grover Cleveland-like return to the Oval Office happens to fall on the same day that we observe Martin Luther King Jr. Day, let’s go with the former.

As he exits stage (far) left, Biden as recently as Jan. 10 insisted that he “could have beaten Trump” had he not been forced by Democratic Party pooh-bahs—Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer—to end a reelection bid that had been irreparably damaged by a universally panned debate performance.

Biden made that ludicrous claim—“without evidence,” to borrow a pet phrase of the so-called fact-checkers in the legacy media—and in so doing, proved conclusively that he’s not only in denial but also delusional.

In the next breath, Biden even more preposterously insisted that his equally clueless vice president also could have won—the Nov. 5 election evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. But he might have added that as an afterthought to avoid humiliating Harris in his statement’s implication that Democrats made a colossal mistake by replacing him on the ballot with her.

As CNN noted Saturday, “Every time Biden says he could have beaten Trump, it’s a fresh reminder that Harris did not, which has added fresh tension to an already complicated relationship between the two in the waning days of their White House partnership.”

But Biden isn’t the only one in Washington who is delusional. In a risible postmortem paean to Biden on Jan. 12, far-left Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson insisted that the outgoing president “leaves the nation much better off than he found it.”

“By any objective standard,” Robinson claimed, Biden “was a very good president whose accomplishments will benefit the nation for many years to come.”

As if that weren’t hyperbolic enough, Kenneth Mack, a professor of law and history at Harvard University, went so far as to tell Politico that Biden was “the most successful one-term president in American history.”

Biden himself appeared to have picked up on that theme in his farewell address to the nation last Wednesday night: “You know, it will take time to feel the full impact of all we’ve done together,” he said, “But the seeds are planted, and they’ll grow, and they’ll bloom for decades to come.”

What that means is that it will now be up to Trump, through the executive orders he issues Monday and thereafter, to uproot those “seeds” then salt the earth so they can never grow back again.

Only in the groupthink of the ideologically cloistered Post newsroom and in the groves of academe could one regard the Biden presidency as having been anything other than an execrable failure.

That’s borne out by a CNN poll, released Wednesday ahead of Biden’s sour and dour farewell address from the Oval Office, that found that “[m]ost Americans, 61%, say they see Biden’s presidency overall as a failure, with 38% viewing it as a success.” (What those 38% were smoking is anyone’s guess.)

And no, it wasn’t, as Biden’s apologists insist, simply a “Cool Hand Luke”-style “failure to communicate” his administration’s accomplishments. There were precious few genuine accomplishments to communicate, unless you consider, for example, squandering $891 billion on the so-called Inflation Reduction Act—most of it spent on green energy and Green New Deal climate boondoggles that did nothing to reduce inflation—an accomplishment.

Biden’s term was four years of what Trump rightly referred to Sunday night as “failure, disaster, and decline.” From 45-year-high inflation that was anything but “transitory” to cavalierly throwing open the southern border to an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants (most of them unvetted) to the catastrophic and humiliating pullout from Afghanistan, all I can add to Trump’s assessment is the adjective “unmitigated.”

Yet in a Jan. 15 interview with “PBS News Hour,” Biden’s hapless press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, chirped, “[Biden’s] done more in four years than most presidents have done in two terms.”

But in Biden’s case, that’s akin to boasting about cramming 10 pounds of garbage into a five-pound bag. So much so, in fact, that it likely will take much of Trump’s next four years to repair the wreckage of Biden’s divisive presidency.

Ironically, that divisiveness was the antithesis of what Biden promised in his inaugural address four years ago to the day.

Biden solemnly vowed: “[M]y whole soul is in this: Bringing America together. Uniting our people. And uniting our nation. I pledge this to you: I will be a president for all Americans. I will fight as hard for those who did not support me as for those who did.”

Whether or not Biden sincerely meant it at the time and intended to make good on that Day One promise, he did nothing of the kind; in fact, quite the diametric opposite.

If there is anything good that has come from the four years of the Biden-Harris administration, it’s that I’ve added three new words to my vocabulary:

omnishambles (“a situation, especially in politics, in which poor judgment results in disorder or chaos with potentially disastrous consequences”)
shambolic (“chaotic, disorganized, or mismanaged”)
kakistocracy (“government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state or country”)

There’s one other takeaway of Biden’s legacy: If his choice of Harris as his running mate hasn’t utterly discredited the concept of diversity, equity, and inclusion, nothing will.

As such, marking the end of the Biden regime would be incomplete without this as an epitaph: Thank God—and the American electorate—that Harris, the poster child for DEI and for failing upward, will never be president.

Still, it’s incomprehensible that 75 million people—48.3% of voters—thought she was fit to be commander in chief and wanted four more years of the Biden-Harris kakistocracy.

So, ending with a quote just as I began, now that we have a new occupant of the Oval Office, we can look forward to “what can be, unburdened (or should I say un-Bidened?) by what has been.”